CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Built in 1910, the Hawthorne Bridge is the oldest vertical lift bridge operating in the U.S. During her shifts, Tammy Vanderlinden stays busy by watching the river, working on projects and responding to incidents on and around the bridge, as well as safely lifting and lowering the bridge. A boat passes under the Hawthorne Bridge. 80 <strong>1859</strong> OREGON’S MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER <strong>2018</strong>
vehicles, 8,000 bicycles, and 800 buses, or roughly the population of Corvallis. But the Hawthorne’s endurance over hundreds of thousands of lifts isn’t a testament to its construction as much as to the men and women who have tended to it for 108 years. By 1930, just twenty years after the bridge opened, Portland estimated it would only last another decade. It was the operators who kept it alive—who noticed how the timber platform warped and cracked in the summer heat, who learned to constantly lubricate the cables, and who even today lift the bridge at regular intervals to wake it up and let it stretch its knees. The rope-and-pulley routine of Hawthorne’s early days has given way to a touch screen that starts the delicate mechanical dance. Gates lower, span locks release, engines rotate, and 1.8 million pounds of concrete eases toward the water, lifting the center span—and the bridge operator, along with the occasional stowaway falcon—into the sky. IT’S ONE OF THE LONELIEST JOBS in Portland—on the Hawthorne especially, Williams said, you might not see another person after relieving the one before you. But it may also be one of the most contemplative. Especially on graveyard shifts, long stretches of silence settle in when river traffic stops. As long as the work is done and you can take action at a moment’s notice, you can kind of just … do what you want. Williams reads The Economist and Oscar Wilde. Some operators knit. Vanderlinden spent time learning Dutch so she could speak to her husband’s family. You are flanked by the city but separate from it, surrounded by people but above them, a fixed post in the current. Even sound feels farther away. The rush of traffic over the Hawthorne’s steel grates dies in the operator’s booth as a lifeless buzz. A police siren bounces off downtown buildings and dissolves over the water. “I think that’s when you get kind of lonely, when it’s nighttime,” Vanderlinden said. The self-proclaimed daughter of a hippie, Vanderlinden spent an itinerant childhood in Berkeley, Seattle and Mexico before she was old enough to choose to stay in Oregon. Like all operators, she started on call. When she came on full-time, she applied for the lead operator position and got it. Now she leads the team from the bridge office three days a week and puts in two weekend day shifts on the Morrison. She has spent so many hundreds of hours watching the bridges that she talks about them as if describing her kids to a new babysitter. The Hawthorne is polite and well behaved. The Broadway, not so much. (“You’re going to get creamed if you don’t get out of their way.”) The Burnside is all business. From the top of the bridge, maybe better than anywhere else in the city, she can see both Portlands—the one that rose alongside the river over the course of many decades, sprinkled with signs of the one to come. “You see right on the east end of the Burnside they’re pulling down the Fishels building,” Vanderlinden said, with something like nostalgia. “That’s going to be something new. They’ve got the new courthouse going in on the west side. That’s going to be a tall glass structure. It’s going to be really different.” The bridges, too, will change. The impending Cascadia earthquake means it’s time for Multnomah County to decide whether to retrofit the Burnside Bridge or replace it altogether—for about $500 million. The Hawthorne, with its twin 450-ton concrete counterweights, would be a catastrophe, but the price tag means the decision of what to do about it may be for the next generation. If the bridges do come down, whether by collapse or by choice, much will be lost. The paintings a previous operator left behind inside the Burnside; the “hobbit door” Vanderlinden squeezes through to enter the Morrison; the sight of a lazy peregrine riding a flagpole into the sky. These things create a sense of place, and the operators a sense of constancy. A bridge operator is not an anachronism, whether you can open the Hawthorne from a laptop or not. (You can.) She is a human, at the end of the day, there to watch out for other humans. That’s what would be lost if the bridges were managed from a computer. Who would be there to greet the flaming car, or to call out to the reckless teenager? To offer a pack of cigarettes to the man dangling his legs over the edge, alone? Being a bridge operator makes you more conscious of the city around you and more aware of your place in it. You think about things you didn’t know were worth thinking about before. That’s why when you ask Williams his favorite time of year to be on the bridge, he pauses for twenty-four full seconds before deciding—winter. The things that went through his mind to bring him there, the solitary privileges of his position, are the same things Tammy Vanderlinden means when she explains why she loves her job. “You see the whole city around you,” she said, “moving.” SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER <strong>2018</strong> <strong>1859</strong> OREGON’S MAGAZINE 81
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